When City first clashed with Poly on the gridiron

The football teams of Baltimore City College and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute will meet today at Morgan State University in what’s being billed as their 130th annual clash. The game, for Baltimoreans, had been a Thanksgiving Day tradition for decades until the date was changed in 1993.

But is it really the 130th game for the Collegians and Engineers?

Paul McCardell, The Baltimore Sun’s indefatigable researcher, found clippings in the newspaper’s archive that listed two different dates, 1888 and 1889, for the first game.

What is known is that it was played, in 1889, according to a 1938 Sun clip, at what was then called Hopkins Field in Clifton Park. Poly in those days was known as the Baltimore Manual Training School.

No account of the game that City won that day was published in the newspaper.

In 1938, on what would have been the 50th-anniversary game, if the 1888 date is observed, The Sun stated that no one from the original City team had been located.

An article in The Sun in 1943 reverts to the 1889 date of the first City-Poly game, stating that it was 20 years after “Princeton and Rutgers introduced football to America.”

To add further confusion, The Sun in a 1969 article posited, “There are some persons who claim the series opened in 1888 and City holds the lead but no records are available to support the claim.”

One thing is certain despite whatever year the first game was played: It still remains Baltimore’s oldest sports feud.

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